The Calm after the Storm

Hey there cycling friends, how are you all doing out there in the big wide world?

Re: today’s title… I know the saying usually goes the other way around – the calm before the storm – but given the run of terrible luck that cycling endured through March and into early April, the past couple of weeks has felt relatively zen in comparison. There have been incidents of course, such is life. But the severity and frequency seems to have diminished to what could perhaps be considered ‘regular’ levels.

The Ardennes classics have come and gone, and the curtain has been drawn on the spring season, with all the classics done and dusted and the first Grand Tour – the Vuelta Femenina – beginning on Sunday, with the Giro d’Italia hot on its heels just six days later. Like, chill out cycling season, give us a chance to have a breather, maybe?

I jest of course. Bring it on, ALL OF IT! Though some time to reflect on what’s been an interesting season so far would be nice. We’ll get to that, in today’s final thought, where I tackle the prickly issue of domination, but for now, let’s take a magical mystery tour through ALL OF THE THINGS AND THE STUFF from cycling over the past two action-filled weeks!

ON THE SITE

Two pieces for you filled with lovely bike-shaped words to cram into your eyeballs.

Of all the Ardennes classics I felt the need to do a deep dive into, it was La Flèche Wallonne. It was a truly memorable day for ALL THE REASONS – read my thoughts on why it was the underdog of the Classics and how it delivered on multiple fronts.

If you’ve been following my series documenting the lives of two friends, housemates and teammates, Saint Piran’s Harry Birchill and Will Tidball, then the latest episode will bring you up to speed with their progress (or lack thereof). If you haven’t, I humbly recommend you do – they’re great guys for one, funny and insightful, and it’s fascinating to learn about life as a continental level rider – check it out (links to previous episodes at the bottom of this piece).

NEWS! THE NEWS IS HERE!

Once again, much of the news from the past couple of weeks centres around transfers and contract extensions, so let’s start with a round-up of all of the comings, goings and stayings:

• Lorena Wiebes extends with Team SD Worx – she will stay will through the end of 2028

• Isaac del Toro extends until 2029 with UAE Team Emirates, following a breakout first year

• According to Italian La Gazzetta della Sport, Demi Vollering is close to signing a deal with FDJ-SUEZ

• Young British breakthrough talent Joseph Blackmore extends with Israel Premier Tech through the end of 2026

• Jan Tratnik is strongly rumoured to be leaving Visma-Lease A Bike for BORA Hansgrohe for 2025

• Jai Hindley and Florian Lipowitz sign contract extensions at BORA Hansgrohe

IN OTHER NEWS…

• The Tour of Britain made its first route announcement, with four stages announced for the women’s version of the race from 6-9 June, clustered around North Wales and the north-west of England.

• The Giro d’Italia has revealed its provisional start list. Though a number of changes are likely before the race begins next Saturday, it’s a strong indication of who we will see lining up in Venaria Reale

• Just four weeks after his crash at Dwars Door Vlaanderen, Wout van Aert is back riding his bike outdoors

• British rider Anna Shackley was forced to quit top level cycling due to tests following a cardiac arrhythmia, her team SD Worx-ProTime revealed. Shackley posted on Instagram about her premature retirement – that one was a tough read. All the best to her for the future

• The UCI announces the dates and venues for the 2024/5 Cyclocross World Cup. The series compresses into a shorter period on the calendar, and from 12 races to ten

THE LIGHTER SIDE

Moments from the world of cycling that made me smile, these past two weeks.

First up, the organisation at the Tour de Jura doubted the abilities of David Gaudu to heft a giant cheese wheel. Well, cyclists aren’t known for their upper body strength.

Next, a major bidon malfunction.

And finally, a typically Victor Campanaerts style Instagram post.

ROAD RACING RESULTS ROUND-UP

I left off at the end of the last newsletter with one more stage of the Giro d’Abruzzo to bring you. That final stage saw the main GC contenders go head-to-head up the final climb, with UAE Team Emirates’ Pavel Sivakov the victor on the stage, with George Bennett (Israel-Premier Tech) and Alexey Lutsenko (Astana Qazaqstan) close behind. The order was shuffled in the final GC, with Lutsenko taking the overall victory, followed by Sivakov, and Bennett in third. For me, it was just really great to see George Bennett up there and challenging in a race again - the move to IPT seems to have really worked for him.

A trio of French races saw a rich vein of success for Groupama-FDJ, beginning with victory for Lenny Martinez in the Classic Grand Besançon Doubs (12 Apr), beating the rest up the final climb of Montfaucon. The second day was a brilliant battle at the Tour de Jura (13 Apr), with a climb of Mont Poupet at the finish drawing out David Gaudu, Guillaume Martin and Felix Gall, along with Jorgan Jegat (TotalEnergies) and Harm Vanhoucke (Lotto-Dstny), who duked it out up the long climb, with Gaudu eventually pulling clear and producing a breathless ‘will-he-won’t-he’ final kilometre in which he accelerated and rested several times in his trademark style, looking absolutely done for at times, but showed his grit to push on all the way to the line and take his first victory in two years – and a massive wheel of cheese (see above). 

The final race of the trio, the Tour de Doubs (14 Apr) saw an ebullient Lenny Martinez once again victorious, completing a brilliant weekend for FDJ.

The Amstel Gold Race (14 Apr) is always good entertainment, and we were treated to two very different but excellent races this year. The women’s race was less selective than usual due to an incident on the road that led to a long neutralisation. This resulted in a race that was effectively just 55km long, with the women going from zero to full speed racing, criterium style over three laps of the finishing circuit.

It delivered a larger bunch to the line than we are perhaps used to seeing at Amstel, and the bunch sprint outcome didn’t exactly go as planned either. With Team SD Worx-ProTime’s Lorena Wiebes storming towards the line there looked to be only one possible outcome. When Wiebes sprints, Wiebes almost invariably wins. However the Dutchwoman fell prey to the ‘celebrating too soon’ virus that’s infiltrated cycling over the past few years and became its latest casualty, as wily fox Marianne Vos knows exactly where the line is, and that was not it. She threw her bike ahead of Wiebes to add a second win at Amstel to her already packed palmares, and prove that experience really pays off.

The men’s race featured the 2019 winner, Mathieu van der Poel, this year’s dominant Classics riders on the men’s side. It was expected to be another walkover for the World Champion, but it turned out not to be his day. An active and dynamic peloton saw many attacks and a group of favourites going clear, but it was INEOS Grenadiers’ Tom Pidcock who won the day, finally taking a win at the race he technically sort of won already in 2021 when Wout van Aert pipped him on the line. Safe to say, since then the race has had multiple issues with photo finishes, not least earlier in the day in the women’s race, so it was good to see a clear victory, as shown below.

Lore de Schepper (AG Insurance-NXTG U23 Team) won the 1.1 GP Féminin de Chambéry (14 Apr).

The Tour of the Alps (15-19 Apr) was undoubtedly the Giro dress rehearsal stage race of choice this year. Featuring a range of riders who will be battling it out for the maglia rosa, the race was interesting and the front-runners closely matched throughout.

Stage 1 saw a first win for Tobias Foss since joining INEOS. Foss will be the third GC option for the British team at the Giro, likely to be behind Geraint Thomas and Thymen Arensman in the pecking order, but he certainly proved himself to be in decent form in the Alps. Stage 2 was won solo by veteran Alessandro De Marchi. Currently riding for Team Jayco-Alula, the Italian was part of a three-man breakaway but struck clear on the final climb of the day and won by 1.20 in the end. A wet and miserable stage 3 saw the lonely figure of Filippo Ganna riding as a lone breakaway and he had his work cut out for him with a fair bit of climbing on the menu, and was reeled back in well before the business end of the race. The day was one for the GC battle, and Lidl-Trek’s former maglia rosa Juanpe Lopez was the victor – and despite his relative confidence in the race and his previous time spent in the Giro leader’s jersey, it was - surprisingly - his first pro win.

Stage 4 was marred by a nasty crash which resulted in Team Jayco-Alula’s Chris Harper crashing into a post – thankfully, he was fine – but the GC battle that was unfolding was effectively neutralised following the accident, allowing EF Education-EasyPost’s Simon Carr to continue on his solo jaunt to victory. The final stage saw a reduced bunch sprint from the GC group, and Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale’s sparkling season continued with victory for Aurélien Paret-Peintre. Even better, his young brother Valentin finished in third.

READ ALL ABOUT LA FLÈCHE WALLONNE (17 APR) IN THIS POST!

VolkerWessels Women’s Pro Cycling Team’s Sofie van Rooijen won the Dutch 1.1 one-day race Omloop van Borsele (20 Apr).

Liège-Bastogne-Liège (21 Apr) saw another mismatch between the men’s and the women’s race. Tadej Pogačar returned to racing for the first time since his demolition of the Tour of Cataluyna, and of course, the Slovenian wunderkind came into the race as the favourite. As usual he more than proved why, attacking on La Redoute, 34km from the finish line, never to be seen again. He recorded a stunning victory, his second at the race, and his sixth Monument overall. It somewhat killed the race as a contest, but let’s face it, we’re used to that. Behind him, the fight for places saw Romain Bardet break away from a chasing group to ride into second place – in a race he abandoned in 2022 to tend to Julian Alaphilippe following the horror crash, it feels like a kind of serendipity to see him effectively ‘win’ behind the out-and-out favourite.

The women’s race was a different story, with plenty of fireworks and a last-gasp sprint for the line from the small bunch of leaders who contested the final of the race. It featured the pre-race favourites, Demi Vollering (Team SD Worx-ProTime) and Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek), alongside the midweek winner Kasia Niewiadoma and three other riders from the day’s early break, including FDJ-SUEZ’s Grace Brown. The Aussie has finished second twice at the race, but she showed her power beating Longo Borghini to the line to take a memorable victory.

On the same day, Antonio Morgado (UAE Team Emirates) took his first professional win at the 1.1 Giro della Romagna (21 Apr).

Ordinarily a very sprint-heavy stage race, the Tour of Turkey (21-28 Apr) kicked off with success for Fabio Jakobsen (Team dsm-firmenich PostNL) on stage 1. Astana-Qazaqstan Team’s Max Kanter recorded his first professional victory at the age of 26 in the final sprint on stage 2, and was visibly emotional - it had been a long time coming. The breakaway dominated late into the day on stage 3 and were subsumed by the peloton just a few hundred metres from the line, and a chaotic sprint followed, with the victor Team dsm-firmenich PostNL’s Tobias Lund Andresen. The Dane added a second stage win a day later on stage 4, with Fabio Jakobsen right behind him, despite a fairly atrocious run-in to the line which mercifully did not result in any accidents.

Tour de Romandie (23-28 Apr) began with a teeny Prologue, just 2.8km packed out with 12 turns on an urban course through the town of Payerne. It was bit of a strange prospect, well suited to good bike handlers, but with an odd mix of riders faring well. It was Tudor Pro Cycling’s Maikel Zijlaard who set the time to beat and held on throughout the day to take the win. Props to Julian Alaphilippe who rather improbably came third – always great to see him performing well.

Stage 2 was an exciting, unpredictable and attacking race which resulted in yet more success for Decathlon-AG2R, as Dorian Godon won the final sprint ahead of teammate Andrea Vendrame for the 1-2. Stage 3 was the first mountaintop finish of the race, and against a stunning backdrop we saw a great day’s racing play out, with a breakaway pair of Thibau Nys (Lidl-Trek) and Andrea Vendrame (AG2R) making it all the way to the line, joined by a late surge from Jayco-Alula’s Luke Plapp. Nys proved the strongest, storming to his first World Tour win, the cyclocrosser proving that you don’t win the Koppenbergcross without legs like that. Or words to that effect.

I’ll round up both Turkey and Romandie in the next newsletter.

Bringing us bang up to date, Chiara Consonni was first across the line at the one-day GP della Liberazione PINK 1.1 race in Italy, with her UAE Team ADQ teammates filling out the top 4 positions on the podium (for context, they were the only WWT level team at the race).

To read more about how all the race unfolded, check out the Race Reports section over at the website:

MOUNTAIN BIKE MASH-UP

Um, excuse me? What is this new off-road based section and how has it found its way into a newsletter about road racing?

I’ll tell you!

The new UCI Mountain Biking World Series kicked off on 13^th April and over the course of two weekend in Brazil I paid more attention than usual to the XCC and XCO disciplines as I was working on writing race reports for the site (see below). HOWEVER – the reason I bring it to you is because simply put, it was quite brilliant bike racing, and if you’re not already following the mountain biking, I urge you to do so.

While the XCC is a short sharp shock of a race – around 25 minutes of fast and furious power – the XCO Olympic distance race usually sees the bunch stringing out and a limited number of riders contesting in the final laps, often with solo winners. The past couple of weeks have seen bigger groups going all the way to the line and it’s resulted in some truly epic racing, and I can’t recommend enough going back to check it out, in particular the men’s XCO from Araxa which quite literally had me on the edge of my seat until the very last moment.

Here is report from the most recent race to whet your appetite – if you have access to Discovery+ you can go back and check out the races – and while I’m not planning on going into quite as much depth on mountain biking as I do with cyclocross in the winter, mainly for time and space reasons given the MTB clashes with the business end of the road season – I do plan on keeping in touch with the races and bringing you some highlights over the next few months.

FINAL THOUGHT – The Classics Imbalance

The spring Classics have come and gone in a flurry of cobbles, rain and drama, and it’s been a strange year, in terms of results. The men’s races have been dominated by, well, domination - particularly in the cobbled classics - while the women’s races have been quite the reverse. In fact, going into this season there was a sense of resignment to the inevitability of another year of SD Worx smothering every race, but it became clear very quickly that this really wasn’t going to play out the way we were expecting. Between internal politics and contract wrangles, the strength of Lidl-Trek, a general increase in form from a few key players outside Team SD Worx and the women’s peloton as whole just getting to grips with how to take on a dominant team and beat them at their own game, there was a decisive shift in the women’s classics this year that led to open and exciting racing with unpredictable results.

It's puzzling to me that while on the women’s side, the general consensus seems to be a distaste for dominance, shared by the vast majority of fans, on the men’s side, the subject is far more divisive. Many fans are finding a great thrill in watching the lengthy solo victories of Pogačar and van der Poel, observing the feats with a sense of awe, while another section of the fandom favours balance, preferring to see races end in a closer battle for the line, and it seems there’s no middle ground. I wonder if it stems in part from the ‘type’ of domination - sport is always subject to dominant teams or individuals, but in the current era of men’s cycling, the individual brilliance and cavalier attitude to racing of the likes of Pogačar and van der Poel is undoubtedly a breath of fresh air as compared with the Team Sky era at the Tour, or the Lance Armstrong era even before that. Watching an individual excel at something is of course one of the reasons we follow sport. And these guys are excelling at it HARD and having fun in the process. What’s not to love?

It's a puzzle I don’t yet have an answer for but safe to say, if you’re in the latter camp, you will likely have enjoyed the women’s classics a great deal more than the men’s, on the whole - a host of different winners, and every race unfolding in a different way. The most memorable of the Classics this year, the one that will stay with me the longest, is Kasia Niewiadoma’s victory on the Mur de Huy. For all the reasons outlined in the above article. And because it wasn’t expected, it went against the grain, and meant so much to the rider and to swathes of fans, it was elevated above just a statistic, an entry on a list of historical achievements, or just another victory for someone for whom winning is a regular occurrence. It had emotional impact, and though I appreciate sport’s appeal is unique to the individual, for me, feeling something is key. Otherwise you may as well just read about it in an almanack (I recommend the Road Book). Maybe for some, who choose not to invest emotionally, witnessing this era of superhumans achieve ever greater feats is really what motivates them to turn on their TVs and watch a bike race. But if you’re driven by the heart, it’s stories like Kasia’s that win the day, every time.

THE LAST WORD

Thanks as always for being a subscriber to the site and newsletter and for reading, and a little advance warning – the next two issues will be written during the Giro d’Italia, and may be somewhat rushed as a result – fear not, though, as with a brilliant team I’m currently pulling together, you will have plenty to read about the Giro, in seven issues of a magazine-style feature-length article that will appear on the website after every three stages of the race – so stay tuned for that!

If you are enjoying the site and/or the newsletter, and you would like to support my quest to continue to provide free cycling content, please consider buying me a coffee, or maybe even purchasing one of the limited edition writebikerepeat Grand Tour casquettes – to celebrate the arrival of Grand Tour season.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Katy